EYH Swarm Pipe Robots (FISH)

One robot, walking a pipe

A FISH unit moves the way a caterpillar does, on grippers and motors. The failure case was designed in from the start: the grippers are spring-extended, so a unit that loses power holds the pipe rather than releasing it. It stays where it stopped. The concept puts many of these in a pipe at once rather than one.

Rules instead of a controller

There is no central controller in the design. Each unit follows local rules that have to produce two things at once: cohesion, so the swarm stays a swarm, and full coverage, so no length of pipe is inspected twice while another is missed. Those two pull against each other, and the rules are where the trade is settled.

The failure case was designed in from the start: the grippers are spring-extended, so a unit that loses power holds the pipe rather than releasing it.

Finding the leak

Leak detection was specified as three sensing methods rather than one: vision, LiDAR and ultrasonic. My part of it was the swarm behaviour mechanics and the AI-based visual inspection, which is the vision half of that stack. It placed third at Engineering You're Hired in March 2025.

Beyond the robot itself

Most of the deliverable is not the mechanism. Operational protocols cover the awkward cases: rescuing a stuck unit, taking a corner, handling a disconnection, recovering afterwards. Around those sat CAD concepts, CFD simulations, electrical and technical drawings, and a business plan aimed at industry. I learned Blender from scratch inside the hack week to produce the system animations, which is how the design got explained at all.